Streaming is fast becoming the way most of us consume media, whether it's music, TV of film. But caught up by the sheer convenience of it all, it's easy to forget to question its environmental impacts. Could streaming actually be bad for the planet?

That's just what a study by Music Tank set out to discover. Some of the results are interesting. How, for instance, does streaming music compare to buying physical media? The report explains:

Streaming or downloading 12 tracks, without compression, just 27 times by one user would, in energy terms, equate to the production and shipping of one physical 12-track CD album.

In other words, repeated streaming of favorite tracks might not be a desirable long-terms media solution. Fortunately some apps—like Spotify—feature a local caching feature, which avoida repeatedly streaming the same song over and over.